With any large-scale construction project, people tend to focus almost exclusively on what they see. The cranes, the pavers and fluorescent green safety vests command our attention; jackhammers and beeping trucks dominate our soundscape.

People like to complain about what they see, because that’s all they know. In the case of the Commons, dominated by these sights and sounds for nearly two years, the real story lies beneath the surface. It’s what people didn’t see — specifically, the women behind the scenes who made the project possible and the issues they faced.

The story starts in Ithaca City Hall nearly 20 years ago with the formation of the Commons Re-design committee. Little did anyone know how long a journey this committee had ahead of it, said JoAnn Cornish, the city’s director of Planning and Development. The first meetings were by consensus, which was frustrating on its own, Cornish said, but as time went on, there was a clear issue the city or the public couldn’t see with and a nearly 15-year-long battle brewing in the board rooms of City Hall.

It was a true battle to get the project approved, Cornish said, the main turning point coming when city Senior Planner Jenn Kusznir pushed a grant application through to the federal government, which was backed by then-mayor Carolyn Peterson and carried to Washington by the lobbyist group Sustainable Strategies, with the aid of now-mayor Svante Myrick. The funding came at a crucial time in the city, as the street was becoming a blighted strip instead of a vital commercial district; businesses were beginning to wilt figuratively in the shade of trees on the Commons, while the trees' roots pushed up bricks on the mall's sidewalks.

“(The Commons) went to repairs and patches and lots of money spent, but finally, the Band-Aids stopped working,” Cornish said. “It got to a point where the city said, ‘this is our property,’ and since we expect the public to take care of it, we needed to do something about this.”

“"We were so entrenched, it didn’t matter what questions or criticisms came up. We were living it.””

Joann Cornish

Talk of a major repaving came up and died when it was clear the 100-year-old utilities beneath the Commons needed some serious repair. The group selected to do it came with a pedigree, one Cornish said served as the benchmark for the entire industry of landscape architecture while she was a college student: Sasaki.

“The original design wasn’t working as well as it could have, for a few different reasons,” said Susannah Ross, a member of Sasaki’s design team for the new Commons. “It was heavily planted in the center and a bit overgrown. There weren’t as many clear sight-lines across the space as you would want for a sense of spacing and in promoting the retail on the Commons.”

Ross, a Harvard graduate and member of Sasaki’s roster for 12 years, was brought into Ithaca in 2007 as one of two women on the four-person design team behind the new Commons. She was joined by fellow Harvard alum Gina Ford, and Mark Dawson and Eric Hutton. They recognized the role of the city’s pedestrian mall as a significant gathering point and set out to design the space as a place for activists and demonstration.

The unseen was set to derail them, too, however.

The city did not fully understand the type of work needed or how difficult the project would be. Cornish said underground vaults in building basements had been abandoned for years. Often unmapped and undocumented, crews had to work around them, causing unforeseen stalls and stumbles along the project's course.

Though the Sasaki team said it had little difficulty on its end in dealing with the public, for the past two years, Director of Economic Development Phylissa Desarno and Cornish faced skepticism and cynicism as the project dragged on, costs inflated and the consequences of construction damaged property, such as one instance when a pipe burst, flooding a business's basement. They had Tammy Baker smoothing community relations for the project, but there was no pleasing some project opponents.

“The mayor kept saying we’d have the best downtown in America, and I kept thinking, ‘it better be,’” Desarno said. “We heard a lot of crying, and rightfully so. What do you say to someone whose business is down by 50 percent and they have mud on their floor? As a committee, we had to believe in it and believe it would be good.”

Pulling on influences from numerous civic gathering spaces and informed by years of experience, the Sasaki team designed a pedestrian mall that elevated businesses.

Gina Ford(Photo: Provided Photo)

“It’s really successful in the way it allows the retail and restaurants to sort of spill out of their space and become part of the life of the space,” Ford said. “The existing Commons, when we started, because it had these very narrow sidewalks and a very tightly packed center, the retail couldn’t spill out the way it wanted to. That was a big driver, how to encourage these store owners to have their retail use their drawing power to activate that space more.”

Many businesses have told Desarno foot traffic in their stores recently, especially on weekends, is higher than it’s been in three years. Even on a weeknight, it's clear to Commons users, life is back on State Street. And though the visible changes in downtown are apparent, it was what the people didn’t see that tell the story of the Commons.

“It all happened behind the scenes, with staff,” Cornish said. “You had those three hours in front of Council, in front of the cameras and merchants coming to meetings to complain, that were the most visible. But we were so entrenched, it didn’t matter what questions or criticisms came up. We were living it.”